Gil Mason/Gunwood USA Box Set

by Gordon Carroll

  Once the last of them made it inside, maybe nine altogether, along with whatever house-help still lived, Enrico took the detonator from his pocket. He flipped up a protective cover, armed the device, flipped up another protective cover, took a last look at his canvass, saw that it was good, smiled, and triggered the switch.

  There was the light — a miniature sun that blasted out from every opening. Then the shockwave, which felt like a very warm hand shoving him hard in the chest. The shove morphed into a push, which instantly changed to a punch that almost knocked him out of the tree. Windows shattered, doors blew outward, fire and debris erupted in all directions. The sound hit an instant later, like a thousand thunder claps breaking directly overhead. The sound carried a shockwave all its own, accompanied by deadly shrapnel that whipped and whirred and warbled and sliced all around and about him.

  This proved the most dangerous part, and he realized he’d laid out a little more C-4 than he needed. Either that or the propane tanks and natural gas lines had aided more than he accounted for.

  A fingernail sized piece of sheet metal brushed his cheek, sliced through the strap of his night-vision goggles, clipped the top of his ear and impacted the tree behind him. With his right hand he caught the falling goggles; with his left he instinctively touched his cheek, feeling the blood and the separation of the cloth and flesh. His fingers swept back and he touched the top flap of his ear; hanging by a strand. Warm blood was beginning to course and the Nomex felt wet. He skewed the mask a bit to the side so the cloth would cover the ear, keeping it from falling off. He wasn’t about to leave that much DNA evidence at the scene.

  Quickly he climbed down from the tree, jumping the last nine feet and landing deftly at the bottom of the thick trunk. He ran to the north, reached the wall, jumped, his foot catching the rough stone about five feet off the ground. His extended right hand hooked over the edge of the nine-foot wall and he pulled himself up and over smoothly. He landed on the other side, ran three blocks to the stolen car he’d left there and climbed behind the wheel, tossing the backpack into the passenger seat.

  Sirens were wailing through the night air, but they were still far off.

  Enrico took in a deep breath, closed his eyes and savored the moment. He stripped off the hood, his cammie shirt. Pulled a swath of medical tape from the first aid kit. He hastily wrapped his ear tight, threw a few butterfly stitches on his cheek, covered them with medical tape as well. He swabbed up the blood that had leaked down his neck and shoulder, cleaned off the camo paint with a towel, pulled a baggy gray sweatshirt over his head, started the car and drove away as the first squad cars blasted past. The louder sirens of fire engines wailed away as they too sped into the area.

  He drove to a vacant lot, disposed of the car in his usual fashion and walked another three blocks to his second stolen car.

  Enrico sat at O’Hare Airport two hours later, waiting for his flight back to Denver. He’d taken time to do a better job on his injuries, which had begun to throb with pain, as well as to dry chew five aspirin and then chug a few gulps of bottled water to wash it all down. Pre-chewing it would get the pain killer into his system that much faster.

  As the plane left the runway and stable ground, for the wobbly, ever shifting currents of air that would float him and the other passengers out of the state, Enrico let himself fall into the gentle arms of slumber. And when he entered the world of dreams his visions were of Cinnamon Twist, holding him in her tiny little arms.

  38

  Sammy Rothstein

  * * *

  Answers

  * * *

  Sammy hung up the phone and pushed away from his computer. He leaned back in his chair, locked his fingers behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. He found it hard to believe what he’d just learned from John MacLeish, a fellow investigator, from the Chicago bureau. Barney Marko was dead. His entire compound had been wiped from the face of the Earth. More than forty people murdered in one night. Chicago PD made a statement saying this could be the single bloodiest night of mob warfare in the city’s history. It wasn’t yet clear which warring family was responsible for the onslaught, but several were under scrutiny and the FBI had been called in to help investigate the situation.

  He took off his glasses, massaging the bridge of his nose. He’d spent the night — well from three o’clock in the morning till seven — with Cinnamon. He’d gotten less than an hour’s sleep. Tired, he’d gladly have given up even the little sleep he had just to be with her. He yawned hugely, rubbed his eyes, put his glasses back on and sat up.

  What did it all mean? The obituaries, the e-mails, the two dead thugs, the exploded car, and now Marko’s entire retinue taken out in a single night? Were they even related? His gut said yes, but he had to leave the possibility open that it was just coincidence. It could be that Barney Marko had nothing to do with the e-mails and obituaries. Or that he had, but his murder had nothing to do with the obituaries and e-mails. Or that he had arraigned to have the people close to Cinnamon killed, but that someone who knew he was involved had sent Cinnamon the e-mails as a warning. Or — or — or — so many possibilities. There had to be something that would click and link the paths to the true source. He just had to find it.

  Sammy locked his computer, put on his suit coat, and left the office. He was too tired to work on the computer. He had to think, to let his brain function; and there was one place where his mind always worked best. He went downstairs to the shooting range.

  He flipped on the light switch illuminating long rows of fluorescent tubes. There was a dimmer, to simulate any time of day or night, but he kept them turned all the way up, since most of his work took place during normal working hours. A series of fans hummed to life automatically, designed to suck the spent gunpowder and smoke out of the air. The range sported three stalls for pistol shooting, complete with electric chain driven targets, and even a one hundred yard rifle tube for medium to long-range weapons.

  Sammy took off his suit coat, hung it up, loosened his tie, put on a pair of ear protectors and attached a new half body silhouette to the center stall’s target holder. He sent the target down to the fifteen-yard position and pulled out his Sig-Saur; a .45 caliber with Trijicon night sights. He carried four spare magazines in pouches on his shoulder harness, as well as the one seated in the gun itself. Behind him ran a workbench that housed cleaning kits and boxes of extra ammo for every departmentally approved caliber.

  Putting the gun back in its holster, seated snugly beneath his left armpit, he cleared his mind of everything and concentrated on the target ahead. He closed his eyes. Took in and let out five slow breaths. He opened his eyes and allowed his mind to flood with all the details of the case. At the same time his right hand slid to the butt of his weapon, his thumb releasing the safety snap, and pulled it free and out. He fired three rounds — two to center mass — one to the head — the shots coming so fast they sounded like one pop.

  Time stopped.

  As the first round exploded out of the barrel, Sammy’s mind exploded with it — into a world of colors and shapes and numbers and calculations. Cinnamon’s face became an ice cold Pascal’s Triangle, her binomial coefficients beginning and ending each row with the number one. Her three sides felt like cactus needles shifting from pink to blue. The string of names from the obituaries flipped and inverted and canter wheeled, swirling and dropping into place like characters on a slot machine. The massacre at the Marko compound phase shifted and intermingled with the Law of Cosines, tasting like blueberry muffins. The two dead thugs outside Cinnamon’s apartment multiplied almost infinitely to the Googolplex, then trisected the Expected Value, running straight past the Expected Value of the Random Variable. The suspect’s description translated to Greek letters, changed color three times, the purity of their chroma exact, the hue’s perfect, then intercepted the X Y Plane and broke apart into the Theorem of Pappus where the volume of a solid of revolution equals the product of the area of the region being rotated times
the distance traveled by the centroid of the region in one rotation.

  The first bullet struck the center region of the silhouette, passed through and spanged into the bullet trap behind.

  They were coming together — all the pieces of the great puzzle.

  A sea of red saturated his thoughts, then valued down to a pink that tasted of cinnamon and vectored to a zero magnitude, before morphing to the shape of a cuboid.

  He saw it now, all of it, merging and shifting and collating into a coherent thought stream that answered all the questions, solved the problems, pieced the puzzle.

  The second bullet hit, punching through the first hole almost exactly.

  Someone connected to Barney Marko had sent Cinnamon the obituaries — eagles danced beneath the sun, breaking into pixels that radiated when struck with a cathode ray, glowing and pulsing and screaming short bursts of tints, tones and shades that spiraled upward following the Chain Rule until they bounced off a Reflexive Property, thinning and shooting forward, speeding their cadence and beat, singling each out until they joined one another again in a mighty fugue that sifted to a Pentatonic Scale that glowed yellow and green but smelled of rust.

  The third bullet punched a perfect left eye in the target.

  Sammy saw the files, the reams of information on Cinnamon, her history and her pain, mapped out in colors and notes and square dances and Angles of Elevation and pastels.

  Marko had ordered the hit on Cinnamon, but the hit man had changed the plan and instead went after the people that had hurt Cinnamon in her past.

  Why?

  Simple Harmonic Motion and the Sector of a Circle, pigmented in E Major explained it all. Only Sammy himself could ever have put it all together and not just because of his special ability — not just that — not that alone. But because he shared the primary common denominator with the hit man — the one thing that glued all the facts together, slammed the pieces home and knocked the ball out of the park.

  Cones, cylinders, stars, all smashed into each other, their colors vibrating at obscene frequencies that reached a crescendo before flat lining in a requiem for the dead and lost life that might have been hers if not for her stature and circumstances in life.

  The common denominator.

  Love.

  Obsession.

  Cinnamon Twist.

  The hit man had fallen in love with her, just as Sammy himself had fallen in love with her.

  The gun fell to his side, forgotten.

  The obituaries were not threats. They were love letters. He was courting her. That’s why he killed the two men outside her apartment. They might have decided he was taking too long to do the job and kill her themselves. So he had protected her. And if Marko had sent them, he might just as well send others. So he had killed them all.

  What kind of a man could take out over forty men by himself?

  Someone very very very good.

  He flipped the switch and the target pulled back to him. He took note of the nearly perfect double tap to the center chest and the left eye hole.

  He checked the electronic timer. Three nearly perfect shots in less than one tenth of a second. He thought of the rookie, Dominic Elkins. He was good, but he couldn’t have matched this. He thought of the hit man who had killed a mob boss and all his hired gunmen in less than half an hour; the man who loved the only woman that Sammy had ever wanted. He might be able to.

  It didn’t matter.

  Sammy wouldn’t let anything happen to Cinnamon. He would protect her. He would keep her. No one would take her from him no matter what.

  He sent the target back down the rails. Twitched his hand so fast it would have been a blur to anyone witnessing the movement. What sounded like a single gunshot sent five bullets down range to obliterate the space of the target’s face.

  No. No one would take her from him. Even if it meant murder.

  39

  Chuck Creed

  * * *

  Trolling

  * * *

  Chuck Creed had the night off. He told his wife he was working an overtime shift, but that of course was a lie. He hated lying to her, always had, but lying was better than the truth in this case. He didn’t want to hurt her — couldn’t stand the thought of hurting her — and that left lying — the lesser of two evils. He ignored the little voice inside his head that said, “Yeah but the lesser of two evils — is still evil.”

  He cruised Colorado Boulevard, taking note of the hookers outside Elephant Guns and Snipers3 and The Dirty Derringer. The women emulated the clubs they worked in front of. Elephant Guns had the classiest, if you could call hookers classy (and having known enough of them over the years, Chuck felt he could), and the girls wore nicer clothes — dresses that were skin tight, but didn’t show too much, working the imagination so one would have to pay before play — and wearing make up like they were super models instead of just whores. They wore fancy necklaces, fancy rings, fancy hair; sparkling diamonds as fake as their breasts, high heels that added four inches to their height, tight girdles and pantyhose that erased extra pounds and inches. They weren’t allowed to do drugs, or at least not the really bad ones, like meth or heroin, or ice. No, for these girls it was a little coke, or X and of course the ever-present pot, legal now anyways. They were allowed to drink whatever alcohol they wanted, so long as they didn’t get drunk on the job or let their looks start to go. They were the divas of the strip and commanded top dollar for their services.

  South of Elephant Guns stood Snipers; a little less classy. The women wore shorter dresses, shorter heels, smaller breasts. Their makeup was often streaky or smudged. They were heavier, or skinnier than the girls up north and there were less decorations — a few crosses and rings, but nothing gaudy or flashy. These were the girls that would take care of the college kids and the occasional husband cheating on his wife. Their looks were on the down slope and most were addicted to one drug or another and all to the liquid spirits. They pulled tricks for fifty bucks in the back seat of a john’s car, or a half hour in a rented room for seventy-five. The club was their pimp and three quarters of everything they made paid for their protection and place on the strip.

  Beyond Snipers sulked The Dirty Derringer. There were several other clubs in between these three, but these were the markers.

  Chuck looked out at the girls hawking their wares. This was more his style — this was where he found his action.

  The girls here were all dopers and lushes. Some did ice, some ‘H’, some even huffed — they all did meth. It was the cheapest with the best high and even though the corrosive acids used in the boiling down and refining processes were already beginning to eat through their skin and break down the cohesive elements that held their flesh together, it was all they had and they clung to it with the fervor of the survival instinct embedded in all life. Most of the women were skeletons barely draped in skin, their bones popping out at awkward angles; but some were fat, with rolls that flopped over rolls, eyes hidden by cheeks that bulged grotesquely, and floppy chins and upper arms, necks that humped in the back like great bison’s and butts and thighs that could envelope and hide a loaded syringe or maybe even a cheap little .380 in their wobbly, gelatinous mass. The women that worked these streets were not young girls for the most part; it usually took years to sink this low, but there were a few — thankfully only a few — that had started way too young and had already been tossed aside and used up until this was all they had left. As a group they were the lowest of the strip’s fornicators. They serviced the bums and the gang bangers and the diseased. They did it in the alleys, or in the front seat or even at the curb. They were quick and cheap — fifteen bucks for the works, ten for less. They were used to men using their fists or their teeth and sported bruises, cracked lips, bent noses. They serviced groups and were open to all the fetishes. They were beyond innocence and immune to shame. They simply survived from one high to the next, waiting for the release of death that would come all too soon for most of them. Their bodies
were incubators to dozens, if not hundreds of STDs. Viruses and bacteria swarmed in the hundreds of millions through their systems, passing from mucus membrane to mucus membrane — from blood to blood — spit to spit — man to woman.

  Over the years Chuck had watched as the girls from Elephant Guns moved their way down the line until they landed here. They would stay for a while; a week, a month, a year, usually not more than that, and then they would just be gone. They almost never died here. One night they would be here and the next — not. And Chuck would never see them again. Perhaps they just moved on, to Nevada or California, but Chuck didn’t think so. By the time they made it this far they were tired — tired of everything — even life.

  He drove on past the Derringer, shaking his head and feeling dirty for them. He parked a few blocks down, behind a closed dry cleaner store. Chuck knew the owners, an older Korean couple who worked hard and were doing all right. He turned the car off, got out and looked around. The lot checked empty.